by Liz Moore
It was strange, she thought, that she had never met any of these people. Even stranger that Lenore never spoke of them. It was as if they did not exist for her anymore, as if they had ceased to exist for her once she put them between the transparent plastic layers of the pages of the photo album.
Cynthia wondered if she would be in Lenore’s photo album someday. She was not there yet. Instinctively, she knew it would be a bad sign the day she found a picture of herself in Lenore’s book. Still, it irked her that Lenore had never asked for one: Cynthia had plenty, taken by friends at shows, taken by Cynthia with false nonchalance. She showed pictures to Lenore whenever she got them, but Lenore always seemed uninterested.
Uninterested. That was a word that Cynthia hated, but more and more it seemed to her that it described Lenore.
X.
Just before five o’clock, Theo calls Cynthia again.
“What’s the word on Jax?” he asks.
“Not good,” says Cynthia. “Doesn’t look like she’ll be going. She’s making me go, though, and write a report. Does that make you feel better?”
“Okay, I’ve got something else,” says Theo. “You ready?”
“Hit me.”
“What if I could promise Jax that Lenore Lamont would be making a surprise appearance at the Burn’s show tonight?”
Cynthia’s heart stops. She wonders if Theo can hear her breathing. She cannot speak.
“Next big thing, right? She’d go if Lenore’s there.”
“Yeah,” says Cynthia. “Yes.”
“Tell her for me, okay?”
XI.
Their last week together, Cynthia and Lenore had been fighting. They were always fighting. They would fight and then Lenore would leave or Cynthia would leave and go for a walk, or if the fight had been bad, one of them would stay with a friend. During these times apart, Cynthia would realize (a realization that always seemed newer, fresher than it ever had before) with crushing certainty how much she needed Lenore. She would have elaborate breakup fantasies: she imagined herself standing in the shower and wailing, imagined clutching herself and doubling over in emotion, imagined crying on the subway and earning sympathetic glances from strangers. For Cynthia, there was always a sort of pleasure in these fantasies, a satisfaction that only comes from self-righteousness. And then, inevitably, her thoughts would turn to the more painful consequences of losing Lenore. She could not bear the thought of waking up without her for too many mornings in a row. She could not bear the thought of doing without Lenore’s body, of being separated from her physically. But it was the thought of losing the chance to play with her onstage that always sent Cynthia spinning; watching Lenore play without knowing that, later, she would share a bed with Lenore—that was impossible. It would not do. And so she always apologized.
They had been fighting on the day Lenore left, but Cynthia always thought she would come back. When she didn’t the first night, Cynthia had the breakup fantasies she liked: the kind that made her feel sorry for herself, the kind that gave her grim pleasure. The second night, she was worried. The third night, her self-righteousness turned to loathing and she felt afraid. She crawled to the shelf in the living room where Lenore kept her photo album and she opened it for maybe the thousandth time and she turned it, page by page. She felt terrible pity for everyone. The girl with Lenore on the subway: What was she doing now? Cynthia was certain that Lenore had hurt her somehow. The bitch. The bitch. Kiss her, she said to Lenore in the photo. She just wants a kiss.
“Did she pull your hair in bed?” Cynthia asked the girl. “Did she ever say your name out loud?”
Then she had an idea. She stood up and went into the bedroom and found a picture she had of herself and Lenore playing together. It was a good picture of Lenore, but most pictures were. More surprisingly, it was a great picture of Cynthia. She looked intense and appealing. Her right hand was raised, about to come down on a tom. She took it and brought it back into the living room, where the photo album was open on the floor. She stuck it in behind the picture of Lenore and the girl on the subway. There, she thought. She was in Lenore’s photo album at last.
Cynthia was still sitting on the floor, still looking at the album when the door opened and Lenore came in.
“I’m leaving,” said Lenore. It was cold outside. Her nose was running and she wiped a hand under it. “Why are you looking at my pictures?”
Cynthia didn’t respond. She picked up the album and turned it toward Lenore and pointed at the girl. “What’s her name?”
“I’m leaving,” Lenore said again. Looked. “Her name was Julia.” She walked out of the room, into the bedroom. She began packing. Cynthia could hear her opening drawers and closing them quietly. She sat on the floor and looked at poor Julia, begging for a kiss, young enough to break, young enough to be in school, and Cynthia realized that none of her breakup fantasies had been right. She would not cry in the shower tomorrow or on the subway. Instead she would burn slowly from the inside with grief—at work, she would think of waking up that first morning with Lenore; at home, she would play Lenore’s songs and remember being on a stage with her; between, she would think of Lenore at odd times. For the rest of her life. She would dread Lenore’s success with the same force that she dreaded her own failure.
She was still in the same position on the floor two hours later when Lenore emerged from the bedroom, her things slung about her haphazardly. Before her on the floor, the album was open to the same page.
Lenore walked toward her and bent down and Cynthia thought for a moment that she was going to kiss her goodbye. Instead she picked up the album and gazed at it for a moment, a small affectionate smile on her lips.
She looked at Cynthia and then down at Julia.
“She was my first girlfriend,” she said to Cynthia.
She left.
XII.
Again with the knocking. Jax seriously considers getting up from her desk, where she is reading about herself on Gawker.com, opening the door, and greeting Cynthia with the words “You’re fired.” Instead she screams, “WHAT!” and waits for a response.
“Another message,” says Cynthia, and her voice is quieter and more serious. She has been considering her options.
“Is it from Theo?” asks Jax. “I don’t want it if it’s from Theo.”
“Can I come in, Jax?” asks Cynthia.
“Fine,” says Jax. “Come in.”
Cynthia opens the door and approaches Jax. “It is from Theo,” she says, “but he has some news.”
“What is it?”
“Lenore Lamont’s gonna play tonight.”
“With the Burn?” asks Jax, suspicious. She pauses. “Why?”
“I think she’s friends with Siobhan,” says Cynthia, knowing that she is, working hard to battle the lump in her throat. Goddamnit, goddamnit, she thinks. She cannot speak of Lenore without the threat of tears.
“Siobhan? Oh, the singer girl. Right.” Jax is interested. She thinks Lenore Lamont might be Titan’s biggest success story this year. She has what’s cool right now: that chick-with-guitar thing (electric, not acoustic—that’s key), that effortlessly-hot-chick thing. She’s a little dirty, and that’s great. Joan Jett for the new millennium. Joan Jett meets Avril Lavigne. “Yeah, tell Theo I’ll be there.”
“Really? Because…I guess this means that…I actually had plans tonight, so if you’re going…”
Jax looks at her secretary and the urge is there again; she thinks of firing her.
“Yes, Cynthia?”
“Maybe I could sit this one out,” Cynthia says, finally. The most annoying thing about Cynthia is her long pauses between statements. She hesitates when nervous.
“I don’t think so,” says Jax. “Unfortunately, Titan needs all its employees to come out to one show a month, as I’ve stated. Moral support; you know.”
“Can I go to a show tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is May first.”
“Can I go to two shows in May?”
Jax rises from her desk. It is five o’clock, and she has to go home and change now that she will be seen in public tonight.
XIII.
Cynthia mists the ficus before leaving. She collects herself and her things, turns off her computer, and presses the down button for the elevator. Outside it is lovely and warm: the start of an early summer. Her heart and her mind are filled with Lenore. How is it, she asks herself, that love can end for one but not another? Lenore still fills her; she is Cynthia’s first thought upon waking, her last before sleeping. But Lenore has done nothing to contact her since leaving. Never even once. It’s as if their relationship of four years did not happen at all. Even Cynthia can feel herself distilling their time together into moments that she does not want to forget: a trip to the Jersey Shore to stay with friends of Lenore’s, during which Lenore was exceptionally kind and sweet to her; a visit to Cynthia’s family’s home in New Hampshire; a bathtub filled with hot water; that first morning together; that first evening together.
What was it in the time between that drove them apart? Cynthia has so often heard the refrain from her little circle of friends—“It wasn’t your fault; it was Lenore”—that she almost believes it, but she wonders at times if she really did drive Lenore away. She cannot bring herself to hate Lenore, not even a little bit. Her internal rhetoric is hateful, the thoughts she thinks in words, but her feelings for Lenore are still loving and tender. In most ways she still thinks of Lenore as she did way back when: as a child that she could care for. She is older than Lenore by seven years. She allows herself one folly: a fantasy that maybe when Lenore is older, wiser, she will see the light and come back to Cynthia. She will realize her mistake.
This is the start of summer in New York, and all around her couples are sitting outside at restaurants, laughing, eating. Just what I need to see, says Cynthia, and tries to laugh at her own expense, but she cannot even muster dark humor.
Cynthia usually loves the city in the summer. It’s so much more open than it is in December or January. Everyone is outside. Everyone is in love.
She walks past a display of TV sets in some electronics store and sees they are all playing the same music video. Three women gyrate silently in time to some inaudible song.
The Burn is playing at eight o’clock. She could just walk downtown. She could just stand in the back of the Bowery, say hello to Jax once, perhaps slip out early.
XIV.
Siobhan and the Burn are backstage. Theo Brigham walks in.
“Where’s Lenore?” he says.
“I don’t know, man,” says Mike R., the lead guitarist. “You’re the one that asked her to play.”
“Siobhan asked her to play,” says Theo. “Siobhan called her.”
“You told Siobhan to call her,” says Mike. “Right, Siobhan?”
“I don’t know,” says Siobhan. “I don’t remember.” Mike is pissed that Lenore is singing at their album release party: it’s their album release party. Lenore will get her own next fall. She’s already got a goddamn billboard in Times Square, and that’s something the Burn can only dream about. Siobhan doesn’t really care. She’s friends with Lenore, for one thing—they’ve been playing the same circuit forever—and she knows why Theo has arranged this. Siobhan has forced herself to stop caring about the little details of record making. It would kill her if she paid attention. She just does what she’s told. Recently she has gotten recognized twice, and these are her first experiences with fame: once, a young woman who told her she had seen her open for Tommy Mays in New Jersey; once, a father walking with two children who grabbed her shoulders enthusiastically and planted a kiss on her cheek.
She likes it now, the way one likes to see one’s name in the newspaper, or to be interviewed on the local news, but she will not always. In five years she will tire of fame suddenly and move to the south of France to wait tables in obscurity, though she will come back to New York in the end.
She looks at Mike now and gives him a subtle shake of her head: the universal sign for “It’s not worth it.”
“She’ll be here. She’s usually late,” says Siobhan.
Theo is pacing back and forth, which is hard to do in the tiny room they’re in. The sound guy comes back to ask Mike one last question about the mix he likes in his monitor, and then they’re on.
XV.
Cynthia, having stopped for a few drinks to bolster her courage on the way down, is late. She stands outside for a moment, hesitating. She could still turn around. She does not know if she’s on the list; she figures that her Titan identification might be enough to get her in. Then again, maybe not. Depends on who’s working the door. She tries the man with the list.
“I’m not sure if I’m on here,” she says. She has never mastered the bravado that others in the industry seem to pick up effortlessly.
“What’s your name?” asks the man with the list.
“Cynthia Kelley.”
The man scans the sheet. “Nope,” he says, and looks away. Cynthia wants to tell him she’s not trying to get out of paying, that she just didn’t know. Instead she walks to the box office, which conspicuously lacks a line.
“How much?” she asks the girl.
“Thirty-five,” says the girl at the window. Cynthia blanches for a second; she knows she does not have that much in her wallet, and, because of her recent purchase of a sweet vintage drum set, she has only about fifty dollars in her bank account to sustain her until her next paycheck. She fumbles for her debit card anyway, aware that if she does not find her way into this concert, another paycheck might not be coming.
“But it’s sold out,” says the girl. “So.”
Cynthia looks around. This might be a perfect way out. She imagines the conversation: “I’m sorry, Jax,” she would say. “It was sold out.” Then Jax would say, “Why didn’t you get yourself on the list? That’s perfectly within your power.” Then Jax would say, “You’re fired.”
Fortunately, the man with the list puts down a walkie-talkie and calls her over. “Cynthia Kelley?” he says. “You with Titan?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“Go on in,” he says. “They’re expecting you.”
Cynthia heads for the door, feeling mildly vindicated. She crosses paths with Theo as he comes out of the venue, talking agitatedly on his cell phone. “She said she’d be here,” he says. “She promised.”
Immediately Cynthia feels the same sort of physical reaction she felt when she saw Lenore on the billboard. Illness. Grief. She is surprised at herself: she should be relieved that Lenore is not coming, and also she should have known. Lenore was many things, but reliable was not one of them. Still, she had been anticipating a glimpse of Lenore, and to be deprived of this is like losing Lenore all over again. Just one little glimpse: that’s all she wanted. One small glimpse from the safety of a darkened room.
Inside, she looks around for Jax but cannot find her. The Burn is already onstage, playing too loud, dressed in their drop-party best. She heads upstairs, flashing her Titan ID as she goes; for this concert, the upstairs is reserved for the label. She looks all around but still cannot find Jax. She recognizes some low-level execs but feels too shy to say hi. She is certain that they will wonder what the secretary is doing here, unaware of Jax’s latest abusive policy. As she is contemplating whether or not to spend more money on a drink, Theo comes in, and she approaches him, relieved.
“Hey,” he says. He looks distracted.
“Hey, Theo,” says Cynthia, trying to be cool. “What’s up?”
“Not much.”
“Have you seen Jax?” asks Cynthia, casually. She would rather die than let Theo know she has been bullied into being
here.
“Ha,” says Theo.
“What?”
“Very funny.”
“I don’t get it,” says Cynthia.
“She’s not coming,” says Theo. “You knew that, right? Jax isn’t coming. We’re basically fucked. The room is packed and no one important’s here to see it.”
Cynthia spends one half second wondering if she will ever be the type of person important enough to be called important, and another one remembering Theo’s telephone call and realizing the implication of his revelation.
As if in answer to her question, the Burn stops at the end of a song and Siobhan says, “We’ve got a treat for you guys. A reeeeeeal treeeeat.” Siobhan is shy when she’s not singing, and sometimes she disguises this shyness by dragging and slurring her stage banter into a semblance of nonchalance. She would prefer it if Mike or Katia or someone else would just talk, and they used to until Theo told them that that was weird, that Siobhan needed to be a real front woman so as not to confuse the audience. “Please welcome my friend Lenore Lamont,” she says, and the room breaks into applause. Most of the kids there are here to see the Burn, but they’ve all heard of Lenore too. She’s still underground enough to be considered cool, but she’s getting big enough to earn new fans as well.
Next to Cynthia, Theo buries his head in his hands, imagining what Jax would think if she were here. He hopes someone is videotaping this, at least. Maybe he can show it to Jax later.
Cynthia approaches the front of the upstairs section as if in a trance. She puts one hand on the railing of the balcony and sees Lenore come onstage. She cannot tell if there is a lull in the noise that marks her entrance or if her hearing has cut out; suddenly all of her senses are consumed by Lenore. It’s funny, the things we feel when we have not seen a loved one in some time: that no time has elapsed at all, that it has been a millennium, illness, shyness, bravery. The disbelief that once you shared a bed with this person. The desire to share a bed once more.
